Thank you, Quora, for finally introducing full-text search

Quora is a veritable treasure trove of data – but search has been something of a beast, highly automated and directing you to previously asked questions instead of allowing you to enter what you’re specifically looking for. Thankfully, Quora wants to make searches easier and more convenient for users, so it has unveiled full-text, keyword-based searches with excerpts.

Quora now presents readers a full page of search results, kind of like what we’re used to seeing from Google’s search results. Before the update took effect, questions relevant to the search topic showed up inside of the Quora’s search box. It looked more like Facebook’s search results pre-Graph Search, where you’d have to you’d have click through to the questions to view the results.

The new search results will surface relevant topics in real-time through its autocomplete algorithm that tries to figure out what you’re searching for. For instance if you’re in the middle of typing out “fashion” and have only gotten to “fash” Quora will suggest “fashion and style.” If this is what you’re looking for and you click on the result, “previews of questions, answers, posts, reviews and more” that are relevant the topic of “fashion and style” will appear in the results. You don’t have to waste time and click through to a question like you would have done before only to have to click the back button to browse another. And there’s a smaller chance that you might have missed relevant questions altogether.

At the same time because Quora’s search engine finds relevant topics while you’re typing in keywords, it will also recommend certain people and blogs that you might find useful while looking for answers.

If you can’t find an answer to your question, you can ask the community by clicking on the “Add a Question” button on the top right corner of the search results page.

Quora has been on an iterating tear. Other recently introduced features include embeddable quotes, classes of elite Quora users to encourage quality content, and an “online now” status that shows you who’s online. The point of this is to ask these users questions in real-time, although that feature might just ending up being irritating for the top Quora users who are bound to get bombarded with enough questions already. As for content discovery, Quora is experimenting with an official blog for users to discover questions titled “Quora Spotlight.”